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Updating Stats by Numbers

I’ve been working behind the scenes on updating Stats by Numbers for the NBA 2012-2013 regular season that will be starting on October 30th, 2012. In order to get the site ready for the new season, I had to make some drastic changes to the core structure. It had been well over a year since I’d done any work to the site and I knew I needed to get a fresh start for it. Some of the design decisions I’d made in 2007 were not so great and the only way to fix things was to scrape the entire frontend of the site. This also meant reworking the database design on the backend to create ways to map my old data into the new formats I’d devised.

The updated scores page for Stats by Numers, with a weekly carousel and date selector.

I’ve mostly completed the backend work and am getting the site ready for launch by processing the box score and play by play data for the last 3 seasons. This amounts to quite a lot of data as there are about 1.64 million plays in just the last few seasons alone. There is still a little more than a month before the season starts and ample time to get everything ready. Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be updating Stats by Numbers with more content and adding posts to the blog on the site.

Dynamic Sandbox

In other news, my brother and I are in full production of our to be announced game. Our game company, Dynamic Sandbox, will be releasing the title in the next 6 months and I will be able to share more information in the coming months. We are both lifelong gamers and are very excited to be working on something we are so passionate about. What I can say now is that we’ve chosen MOAI to be our framework; this allows us to write one set of code and port the game to many devices thanks to the cross-platform architecture of MOAI. I can’t wait to share more about we’re working on in future posts!

Make Music Productions

It’s been a while since the last update, but that is because there has been a lot going on behind the scenes in the meantime. I’ve been working on establishing a record label to release my own projects and those of my friends. That record label officially launched on August 10th 2012 and is called Make Music Productions. Make Music Productions released Opener by A Rising Force, my band, on August 9th, submitting the song through TuneCore to iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, and other music distribution stores.

With the release of Opener, there has a been a significant increase in the fan base due to the promotion of the single. The SoundCloud page now has 135 followers and continues to grow steadily. The A Rising Force Facebook page is up to 145 fans, but is largely dependent on running ads to gain fans; without the full album available, it’s hard to promote a single song for a very long period of time without other content to go along with it.

Jango Airplay Internet Radio

The other tool I’ve been trying to promote the band and the single is internet radio airplay. I’ve been using Jango Airplay to promote the band using paid plays after other similar artists. There was a bit of a challenge in finding the exact right artists to match for the song, but I’ve tweaked the settings over the last few weeks and think I finally have it down. I started off strong with a PopScore of 85, which I’m guessing means 85% of the people liked the song or something to that effect. That score netted my a bonus of 100 song plays for my first week (I used a few hundred plays to get that score so not a bad trade). Things went downhill once I started messing with the targeting controls trying to get into the 90s. Bad move. The next week I slipped to a PopScore of 55, still enough to earn 50 bonus song plays, but not the effect I wanted. I knew I needed to change course and go back to what was working week one, so I stripped back the targeting and focused on what had worked the first week. The results for week three were better, getting me a PopScore of 59, but more importantly – I was finally starting to understand what I needed to do to reach the right audience.

Jango Airplay – A Rising Force : the PopScore is back up to 82 this week from 59 last week.

The trick that I finally learned was to focus on only the minimum number of bands required for targeting. This means you only choose 5 bands to play songs after. That strategy seems to work the best and I’ve been able to tailor the bands to the exact song I’m promoting. What I also learned was that as much as I’d like to think fans of my favorite artists may like my music, they may instead be a bad fit or the song could be too different from the style of that artist. It turns out that fans of the Arctic Monkeys like my music the best. I would never have guessed this, but with the analytics available to me through Jango, I’ve been able to discover it. I’m pleased to say that using my new techniques, I’ve been able to get my PopScore back up to 82 this week! We’ll see where it lands, but I’m very happy with the results so far. I’ll be using these techniques when with other Make Music Productions by A Rising Force and other artists I’m developing.

Before I sign off for this post, I’ll say that I’ve been working on some updates for Stats by Numbers. I plan on launching a new site soon and preparing for the upcoming NBA season. More to come about that in the next post…

SoundCloud has also been a great way to connect with new fans for the band. As of today, there are 69 followers for the A Rising Force account and it has only been up for a couple months. I waited way too long to start posting my music online – the earlier you can get your music up to start getting feedback and connecting with fans, the better. Once all the audio content has been posted, I’ll finish editing the video track reviews and post them to the band website.

About a week ago, we launched the new version of Appraiso.com – the website appraisal and scam detection tool. One of my parters, Morgan, has written a great post about the whole process. We are excited to release the new features to our daily users, who have been eagerly anticipating their launch. As always, we’ve got more that we’re working on behind the scenes and we can’t wait to show you once it’s finished.

If you haven’t already tried Appraiso, head over to https://appraiso.com/ and sign up for a free account to get started!

I’ve been threatening to launch a blog about fast food for some time now – well over the weekend I finally got around to getting the domain and setting it up. The first two posts are now up for Fast Food Feeds:

I’d like to welcome you to the relaunched What’s Going On, my personal blog. I’ve decided to move it off blogger.com and instead use WordPress to host it on my own site. The reason for this is because WordPress gives me more control over the look, feel, and content of the site. It is also a great way to customize the site without having to do much work. I’ve decided to launch a personal website as well – located at http://bobbyoster.com/

This is where I’ll be hosting my blog, creative writing, and game development projects. I plan on updating my other site (Dynamic Sandbox) to be a hub for all of my projects, but for now each individual site is the best place to get the most up to date information about that project. Speaking of projects, here is the latest list of my personal projects:

Hopefully the next post will be somewhat more interesting than me blabbing on about all my personal stuff. I look the make the blog a place where I discuss a wide variety of interesting topics. My goal is to post at least once a week and more frequently when I have something to talk about. Okay…that’s it for now. Time for sleep.

I haven’t been able to record in a long time because my TonePort UX2 isn’t working and the phantom power on my EMU (for my condenser mics) isn’t working either. I finally bought some external phantom power supplys, but haven’t tried them yet. I’m looking forward to giving it a go this weekend. I desperately need to get these tracks finished and start working on the production.

With regards to my other side projects, I’m still heavily looking into some type of app (leaning towards game) development for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The only problem here is the capital investment of buying a Mac. I’d probably get an 13-inch MacBook Pro or a Mac Mini if I wanted to save some $$$.

The other project is a website focused on NBA statistics. I can’t talk about too much yet, but I plan on launching it in the very near future.

Lots of great NBA action in the past two days, and even more horrible calls. I’m usually not one to complain, but things have gotten out of control. Ron Artest is ejected (again!) for a straight up hard foul. In the end, the league decided to reduce it to a flagrant one…come on. He deserved to have it recinded, but they didn’t want to embarass the refs. That’s fucked up; he becomes the scapegoat because of his past history. To be fair, even in that incident, the fans acted as a catalst for the violence by provoking him. His fault is not backing down, but he has learned to control himself (although he does get heated) and not blow up. Ron knows what is going on and refers to it as ‘past history profiling’. At least the guy has a sense of humor about it.

“At the end of the Dallas-Denver game this evening, the officials missed an intentional foul committed by Antoine Wright on Carmelo Anthony, just prior to Anthony’s 3-point basket.”

Weak. Let’s hope things turn around and the refs start getting the calls right. NBA refs are the best in the world (I know you hear that cliche all the time, but it’s true) and need to show it. Next up: Lakers @ Rockets tomorrow 12:30pm on ABC

What a great game! Kobe showed us what we already know; he can light it up anywhere, anytime, putting up a 40 point gem. I loved the yells to Battier, ‘He can’t guard me!’ Talk about the opposite of Dirk. I’m a little bummed that Fisher got suspended, but I understand it and am glad that he made the play. Next stop Houston on Friday. Go Lakers!

Monday is the start of the second for the Lake show. The matchup is a favorable one with the Lakers going 4-0 against the Rockets in the regular season. I’m looking for Andrew Bynum to pick up his game and play to the competition. He needs to stop getting so many cheap fouls and focus on staying in the game. Starting should help that, giving him the consistent minutes he needs. Can’t wait for gametime – 7:30pm PST TNT.

While we’re on the subject of basketball, this Bulls/Celctics series has been amazing! Last night there was a triple OT (the fourth OT game in the six game series) that pushed the series to a game 7. Can’t wait for tomorrow to see how this plays out.